Using Text Images in Heading Tags

[glenngould]

What is the proper usage of images in heading tags? Do I have to hide the actual text in a way or any other options? I guess the alt tags don't work for SEO, right?

Edit:

well, a similar thread http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=164789

[xhtmlcoder]

No you don't have to hide the text at all as long as the image makes sense as a h1 and isn't some fluffy dice.

[glenngould]

My concern is that, the text-image is not crawled by search engines.

[Stormrider]

I think search engines do look at alt tags, but not in the same way as H1's obviously.

[glenngould]

I think search engines do look at alt tags, but not in the same way as H1's obviously.

Yep, that's what I know. So what to do? I need to use gif's for my headings designwise.

[Dan Schulz]

Have you looked into using a plain text header with an empty SPAN element right after the opening <h1> tag, with the image being served as a background via CSS?

Sitepoint has an article on how to do this, called Accessible XHTML Headers (don't let the letters "XHTML" fool you, it works just fine on HTML 4.01).

[glenngould]

Have you looked into using a plain text header with an empty SPAN element right after the opening <h1> tag, with the image being served as a background via CSS?

Yeah, SP is using the same method on this site..I doubted this may be incompatibe for some browsers (for the SP logo, but I'll use it many times not just once), but I'll check that article to confirm that. Thanks.

[RetroNetro]

There is also SIFR.

[Dan Schulz]

Only browser I've seen it NOT work on is Internet Explorer for the Macintosh.

But that's a dead browser anyway. IE5+ (Win), Netcape 6+, Mozilla, FireFox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, etc all support it.